✅ Today’s checklist:
- Overprepared: problem or oxymoron?
- Suss out work-life balance for a job you haven’t started yet
- TA reader Marianne shares job search advice
🤔 Riddle me this: I go up and down, but I never move. What am I? (Find the answer on the bottom).
QUICK LINKS
📢 Communication: A social psychologist on balancing niceness and constructive honesty at work.
🤝 Allyship: New white papers on allyship and negotiation—created by women in engineering, science, and technology.
🔍 Job Search: Leveraging Enneagram to better understand your key career assets.
🌀 Career: Career identity can stabilize your sense of self…and also drive it to change.
💪 Values: You finally asserted yourself, and people didn’t like it. Now what?
PRODUCTIVITY
The Dark Side of Planning and Preparation
If you find a sense of comfort and control in meticulous planning and preparing—if you always have your ducks in a row and then some—then you might want to sit down before reading the lines below.
“The desire to meticulously plan every detail of our life can inadvertently lead to a cycle of overpreparing and underachieving, leaving us overwhelmed and unfulfilled. Trust me; been there, done that. And it sucks.”
These words belong to writer and marketing expert Lara Hayes, whose Medium article Stop Overpreparing and Underachieving: My Go-To System for Planning 2024 the Right Way reads like a refreshing, though slightly chilly, breath of fresh air for anyone who finds the following thoughts, feelings, or scenarios all too relatable.
- Well, I could have spent half the time on that, but better safe than sorry, right?
- Detailing what you still need to do but feeling enabled to explain why all those things really need to be done.
- Coming up with other things you should probably double check when you notice you’re getting close to finishing something.
- Feeling uncertain how you would even approach a project without a thorough to-do list or checklist.
Don’t get us wrong: planning and preparation are positive things. Hayes’ overarching point is that planning and organization are assets when they positively contribute to your goals. However, like many good things, there is a tipping point where continued planning and organization starts leaching your mental clarity and productivity instead of truly contributing anything of value to your work.
Luckily, Hayes offers some solutions for anyone who suspects they may be pushing their planning and preparation habits towards or over that tipping point:
1. Keep reflecting on the details…just try to focus only on the truly important ones.
Being able to separate relevant and irrelevant details is key to optimizing the benefits you get from your fantastically detail-oriented side. Anyone who loves planning has this capability. They simply need to…press ‘play’ to activate it.
The act of planning can feel so innately virtuous, it’s easy to get stuck in an every-detail-is-important mindset. Simply remembering to ask yourself which ones really are important can get you unstuck.
2. Make your goals—whatever you’re planning and preparing for—specific and precise.
Hayes invokes the classic SMART framework for this tip. The more Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely you can make your goals, the easier it will be to spot superfluous planning.
3. Alter how you engage with planning.
“Rather than succumbing to the overwhelm of elaborate planning, I recommend streamlining the process and getting rid of the unnecessary noise,” Hayes writes. “Make the act of planning as painless and swift as possible. Your friend is running late to your house party? Your favorite TV show is not on yet? Your chicken needs to cook for half an hour? Great, use those 30 minutes to plan your year.”
“By adopting a minimalist approach to planning, you can prioritize the most impactful goals and actions, reducing excessive complexity and ensuring a more direct path to success.”
4. Make space in your mind for some chaos and randomness.
Instead of trying to plan and prepare your way around chaos, accept and embrace its inevitability.
“Because while planning is crucial, embracing flexibility is equally necessary,” Hayes explains. “Life is unpredictable, and unforeseen challenges are inevitable. By building flexibility into our plans, we can adapt to changing circumstances with resilience, turning unexpected obstacles into opportunities for growth.”
To prove to yourself that you can accomplish good things without planning out every step beforehand, give yourself permission to try jumping into a few things without any planning at all. Give it at least 15 minutes before determining whether it’s working or not. In the case that it’s not, no sweat—giving it a try will surely leave you with at least one constructive insight.
COWORKER MILESTONES
Celebrations at Work Made Simple
When you spend 40+ hours at work every week, our coworkers can sometimes become our support system.
Cheer on your coworkers passing big milestones with a personalized and meaningful group card from the whole team.
Whether it’s for a new baby, wedding, birthday, or promotion, GroupTogether makes it simple to bring teams together to commemorate the occasion.
You can even have the team chip in for a gift to add to the card!
How It Works:
- 🤔 Pick a Card: Find the perfect card to suit the occasion.
- 🔗 Share a Link: Let your team sign (& chip in for a gift if you’d like) and leave messages online.
- 💌 Send the Card: Deliver the card digitally or print it & hand it to them in person.
It’s simple and so meaningful.
BIGGEST CHALLENGE
Balancing Ambition and…Life
One TA reader is worried about falling into the grass-is-greener trap:
The biggest challenge I am currently facing is being near degree completion and wanting a better job, but worrying that I won’t find a job with the current family-work life balance I have.
You bring up a very real and crucial concern, dear reader, one we’re certain many others share.
While this may seem obvious, we feel it’s important to say explicitly: The concern is substantial and legitimate, but please don’t let it stop you from at least exploring other opportunities. When you’re considering offers, use work-life balance as a make-or-break factor in your decision, but don’t let it deter you from getting to that point.
Okay. That’s enough from atop the soapbox for now…
Let’s talk about how you can get an idea of what kind of work-life balance you might enjoy at a job before you’ve started.
The before you’ve started bit is key. While it’s true that you will never really know what the work-life balance will be like before you start, you can take measures to find out as much as possible before you accept an offer.
If you prefer not to broadcast how much you value work-life balance during the interview phase…
Try some of these genius stealth techniques from the founder of the career coaching group, Woken.Ⓡ
To summarize, ask creative questions that get to the core of their existing employees’ work-life balance. In other words, ask about….
- The capacity of their team(s)
- The turnaround times for their typical projects
- The cadence of urgent or unplanned work they manage
- How they handle scheduling and task distribution
- Their processes for handling coverage for vacations or unplanned absences
- Their benefits (They might all say “work-life balance” is a benefit they offer. To find out who truly means that, ask to hear about some specific benefits and drill down to the details. Ex: If they say employees accrue vacation, then ask how exactly they accrue it and at what rate.)
- The size of their teams or pods
- How they handle project management
If you have no concerns about expressing how much you value your work-life balance…
Sweep aside any concern that asking about work-life balance will seem taboo to potential employers. (Sure, it might be to some, but those are not the ones you want to work for.)
Next, write a list of the specific questions you have about work-life balance to bring to interviews and even interview scheduling touch points. Work-life balance is a broad term that carries different meanings in the context of different lives.
A startup might tell you they prioritize work-life balance because they allow employees to start later in the morning, 10 or 11 AM, but we’re guessing that’s not exactly the variety of balance you’re looking for.
Try to ask about precisely what you want to know about their work-life balance culture.
For example, if you have kids, and what you really want to know is whether or not your potential employer will be okay with you shuffling your schedule as needed to be present for them…when they get sick, need early pick-ups, have school events you don’t want to miss, etc., then you might say something like: My family is my top priority, and being there for them is very important to me. Do you have any structures or systems in place that enable busy parents to shuffle their schedules or make up work when things they have no control over come up?
Hungry for more advice? Here are a few more goodies:
- 4 Tips for Identifying an Employer’s Work-Life Balance (Higher Education Recruitment Consortium)
- How to Discuss Work-Life Balance During an Interview, With Examples (Joberty)
EVENT PLANNING
If Your Event Planning Is a Mess—Here’s How to Fix It
Fall is basically here, and the holiday season is just around the corner—meaning event planning is about to kick into high gear.
Whether it’s offsites, marketing events, or festive gatherings, the monday.com events template has you covered.
Visualize every step of your planning process, streamline RSVPs, and track success with intuitive dashboards.
Sync your team, store crucial documents, and automate the mundane tasks, so you can focus on what really matters—making your event unforgettable.
SUBSCRIBER SPOTLIGHT
Always Ask Why
STAFF PICKS
Stuff We’re Loving This Week
✈️ Travel like a pro with Navan, your go-to for hassle-free, efficient business trips that save you both time and sanity.
🏷️ Level up your organization game with this sleek label maker—because everything looks better with a custom label.
📧 Dread your inbox less. Let Sanebox do the heavy lifting by filtering out the noise so you can focus on what matters.
📚 Get the inside scoop on what makes teams thrive with The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle—a must-read for anyone serious about leadership.
JOB OPPORTUNITIES
🚨 Job Ops: Visit our job board here.